Dell Whisks the Wraps Off New Tablets, Laptops

By Richard Adhikari
Oct 3, 2013 11:24 AM PT

Dell on Wednesday released new tablets and updates to its XPS line of laptops for geeks, less than three weeks after founder Michael Dell won a long and bitter battle to take the company private again.

The company launched two Windows 8.1 tablets and two Android tablets under the revived "Venue" name.

It also unveiled the XPS 11, XPS 13 and XPS 15 laptops.

"It's a nice lineup of products," Bob O'Donnell, a program vice president at IDC who was at the launch, told TechNewsWorld.

"I like the new notebooks," he continued, adding, "the Android tablets are pretty nice for cheap tablets, and have good-looking screens."

Dell's
PocketCloud application is preinstalled on all the devices, and that's "an interesting piece of software, because it lets you share your documents across all your devices regardless of what OS you're running," O'Donnell remarked.

The company is "trying to up the game by bringing in some unique and interesting software," he said.

A Look at Dell's Laptops

The XPS 11, priced at US$1,000, is a 2-in-1 Ultrabook that weighs 2.5 lbs. It has a 360-degree rotating hinge and a solid-surface backlit touch keyboard.

The XPS 13 has a 13.3-inch edge-to-edge full HD display, a 4th generation Intel Core processor, and an Intel HD 4400 graphics processor. It has extended battery life, weighs less than 3 lbs., and is priced at $1,000.

Hard drive configurations are 500 GB and 1 TB with a 32-GB mSATA solid state drive, or a 512-GB solid state drive. All the drives include Intel Rapid Start technology.

The XPS 15 is priced at $1,500.

Oak Trees From Little Acorns

Dell "is going to do what they said they would do -- which is diversify away from the client -- but not forgetting that the client is very important both to the sales process and to the relationship with their customers," Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis at the NPD Group, told TechNewsWorld.

"By [Dell's] getting some of the cheaper products out and working with developers to create apps for many of those vertical-based scenarios [such as healthcare, pharmaceuticals and retail], and adding more software and services in terms of information management and analytics and storage and services, we see a very compelling business model," said Frost & Sullivan's Krishna.

PocketCloud indicates Dell's future goals, IDC's O'Donnell suggested, because "people increasingly care less and less about their devices and more and more about their data and how they're going to move it -- and that's what PocketCloud lets them do."